Ezra Levant’s Soccer Balls

He may have lost his Sun Media bully pulpit, an ever-increasing number of defamation suits and any vestigial dignity, but Ezra Levant keeps on fibbing the good fib.

The tireless Muslim-hunter was at it again with a blaring April 29 headline on TheRebel.media: “Islamization of Canadian schools: Hamilton school board wastes your money to buy Hijabs for Muslims”

Islamization? Hot damn! Newshound Ezra had nosed out this scoop on flagrant misuse of public money by reading the previous week’s Hamilton Spectator – or rather by spectacularly misreading it.

The Spec had actually reported, “The Hamilton-Wentworth School Board Foundation—the board’s arms-length fundraising arm—is launching a campaign to raise funds of the purchase of sports hijab for Muslim girls.”

By the time the news reached Ezra’s faithful lip-movers, however, the foundation and its fundraising had faded into the deep background:

“The Hamilton-Wentworth School Board will raise $10,000 in public funds to buy Hijabs for soccer teams,” quoth Ez. “This is the Islamization of Canada’s schools.”

It’s a classic demonstration of the Ezra Method, a reverse Goebbels that relies not on the Big Lie, but the little one. His sly use of “public funds” is true-ish, in the sense that donations would come from members of the public. But it also sounds to the average Rebel fan that the school board’s tax-funded budget has been hijacked for burqas or bomb belts or whatever the fuck a hijab is.

As for “your money” in the headline? Well, er…

This squalid effort sadly leaves the little pisher 0 for 2 in his crusade against the creeping Islamization of our schools. Readers may recall back in November, Ezra was on the scent of another school board outrage for Sun Media:

“It’s Remembrance Day. But not for everyone. The Greater Essex County District School Board in Ontario circulated an e-mail [saying] teachers should be prepared to exempt Muslim students from Remembrance Day…. It’s a disgrace that any family would object to it–especially an immigrant family who came here to benefit from our country. It would call into question the basis on which they applied for and were granted citizenship.”

Factual content: The board issued a memo advising that if some parents wanted their kids exempted, teachers should plan other activities for them. The rest was unadulterated Ezra.

“Understand that these Muslim families who purportedly object to Remembrance Day do not exist,” fumed the Toronto Star’s Edward Keenan. “Those ungrateful immigrants live only in Levant’s imagination. The memo he refers to—as he notes later in his column—doesn’t even mention Muslims…. The school board has confirmed: no Muslim family—in fact, no family of any kind—asked for an exemption from ceremonies.”

As for Levant’s fashion policing of the soccer pitch, his hijab panic is xenophobia most stale.

The game moved on some time ago, with FIFA last year officially sanctioning all manner of religious headgear – hijabs, turbans, even Jew hats, available through Soccer Sport Kippah at skullcap.com.

The ‘reverse Goebbels’ analysis is brilliant and spot on. It’s employed in the second example too: if a Muslim family had asked for an exemption for their kids, the memo would have permitted it, wouldn’t it? So it’s true that the memo implied that teachers should be prepared to exempt Muslim [and Hindu, atheist, Christian and Jewish, etc] students…